A place to put all the nerdy bits of artwork I do in my spare time.
All work copyright Nick Carver 2008-2012

Wednesday, 5 September 2012

Hybrid Characters

Hi there,

Here's a bunch of character designs for industrial workers toiling away in the factories of Dustrum. I want to do some architectural designs, like I did for the slums, to accompany these characters:

I took a slightly different approach to these guys and created silhouettes in Photoshop that I then printed out and used as a basis for the linework using a Colerase pencil. I then scanned the pencils in and coloured them up in PS. Here are the original silhouettes:

Also, a couple of people asked if I could show the process behind one of my pieces that uses 3d as a basis, so here are a couple of images for the Silver Dagger I posted last time. I initially did some doodles on paper for the design, but they were too crappy to scan! So after that I did a quick silhouette design in Photoshop:

Then I created a 3d model in Maya using custom parts and some kitbashed stuff from models I found online. I doodled over the top of a screengrab to get some ideas for how I wanted the details to look. I do this a lot (drawing over my work) often in bold red to remind myself of things I need to fix/add. I find it's really handy to do this when you leave a piece part way through as it helps you focus when you go back to it again. It's also a good way to quickly test out ideas.

After the modeling is done I do a quick render as a start for the paintover. This model ended up being more finished than most of my blockouts. I often just render a simple directional and ambient occlusion render with just a default lambert rather than adding specific materials, but this time I decided to try doing more in the render and less in Photoshop:

After that it's just a case of adding details, overlays etc.Hope this is useful.